Microscope dino ID and solution request

[jccaclimber]

Pictures attached. The tank has brown snotty stuff with air bubbles in it growing in the hair algae I am independently battling.
I'm assuming these are dinos, but don't know what type. Is this a type that is well resolved with UV, or is a different method preferable?
It isn't plumbed in currently, but I have a 40 W UV unit I can put in.
System is ~170 gallons.

 

[ScottB]

Those are ostreopsis. They swim free at night so the UV will knock them back. You should run some activated carbon as well as these buggers are toxic.

You can also clamp some filter floss to the sides of the tank in high light and flow areas during your light cycle. Rinse before lights out.

 

[ScottB]

Run the UV DIRECTLY TO/FROM the display. It is ugly but only temporary. Much more effective this way. Run it SLOW like 2-300 gallons per hour to maximize contact time.

 

[jccaclimber]

Ugly but functional is my specialty. Is the carbon needed to counter byproducts of their death, or things they might give off between now and when I get them killed off?

 

[ScottB]

Ugly but functional is my specialty. Is the carbon needed to counter byproducts of their death, or things they might give off between now and when I get them killed off?

Honestly I don't know if the toxins are produced for defensive or predatory purposes. I assumed predation. Either way, you want to knock it down to lower stress on competitors.

 

[ScottB]

Not required, but some choose to do a 2-3 day blackout to speed the process. Make sure the bulb is good and <12 months old.

 

[jccaclimber]

Bulb has some age, but I doubt it has more than 80 hours of actual run time. I bought the bulb new and only hook it up for special situations like this. I’ll make sure the quartz sleeve is clean when I hook it up.

 

[Subsea]

Ugly but functional is my specialty. Is the carbon needed to counter byproducts of their death, or things they might give off between now and when I get them killed off?

Yes to both those statements on activated carbon removing toxins. More importantly is removing conditions for the microbes to grow like DOC (dissolved organic carbon).

Ostreopsis - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Ostreopsis is a genus of free-living dinoflagellates found in marine environments.[1] Some species are benthic; the planktonic species in the genus are known for the toxic algal bloomsthat they sometimes cause, threatening human and animal health.

 

[jccaclimber]

UV is hooked up, the pump I’m using fully throttled back is moving 120 gph through the UV (measured by time to fill a beaker) so hopefully that’s sufficient dwell time.
I also added some carbon in a sock on one of the drain lines. Last I remember there wasn’t really a good way to determine when activated carbon is used up, has that changed?

 

[ScottB]

UV is hooked up, the pump I’m using fully throttled back is moving 120 gph through the UV (measured by time to fill a beaker) so hopefully that’s sufficient dwell time.
I also added some carbon in a sock on one of the drain lines. Last I remember there wasn’t really a good way to determine when activated carbon is used up, has that changed?

I'd refresh the GAC say every 10 - 14 days.

 

[jccaclimber]

No real change up to yesterday, and the usual dino spot still looks like brown snot in the morning. I've been hitting the hair algae patch they live in with H2O2, but it hasn't slowed it much. I moved the inlet to the pump feeding the UV closer to them after the first day, but that didn't seem to make much difference. The other flow in the tank is definitely stronger than this pump.
Yesterday was water change day, so I sucked a bunch of them out and then hit it again with H2O2. Some slight bubbles in the algae there this morning, but only slight, so hopefully this continues.
I haven't stumbled across any filter floss in my boxes of stuff try that, but will keep looking.

 

[jccaclimber]

I think I've beat them, but I'm not sure if the UV did anything. After a week or two I started noticing LPS dying, and frankly have lost a lot of coral since then. I'm even having what I can only describe as polyp bailout on my duncans and chalices, I've never seen anything quite like it before. The few remaining acros are mostly gone. Other coral seem untouched, and the clam is happy. I didn't have any of those issues through months of looking at the dinos and intermittent algae fighting. I'm not at all convinced the UV unit is the cause, just noting it. The entire time the dinos were really only in the (plentiful) algae.

Process was as follows:
Put on the UV and carbon.
Around a month in I stopped changing the carbon, not noticeable changes.
Around Thanksgiving I started growing my own phyto, and have been intermittently adding it in December.
Somewhere mid December I turned the UV off for a week. Nothing got better, nothing got worse.
Intermittently I have been using strong (>30%) H2O2 to spot treat algae. I've been doing this off and on all year. You need to keep it away from the coral, but it's great (in very small amounts) at killing hair algae. However, the algae always grows back.
Mid to late December I bought a few dozen turbo snails (had been slowly adding them as they were available).
After a week of watching the algae keep spreading (it's covered the entire tank a couple times) I went back in with the H2O2. The algae is 98% gone, and seems to be staying away this time, or at least has for the past week.
The dinos vanished a week or so ago when I had the first 90% of the algae gone, especially in higher light areas.
The polyp bailout is continuing, but I've shut the UV off today. Will post back if the dinos return.

 

[ScottB]

Sorry for the losses.

I can't believe I failed to mention nutrients. I guess all the GHA threw me off that typical topic in relation to dinos.

Often, dinos get a foothold when one or both NO3 and PO4 are absent. They then become the dominant consumer of nutrient, starving out corals. Not sure this is the case for you, but when they consume all the PO4 in particular, LPS and SPS really take a hit. Phyto is a good source of PO4.

Were you measuring PO4 (with Hanna) and NO3?

 

[jccaclimber]

Nitrate has been between 2 and 12 over the past few months depending on how much I’ve dosed.
Phosphate was near 0 (Hanna 736) at the start of this. A combination of dosing and feeding got it up to 0.15 by mid to late November. I shut off the doser, expected it to go down, and got lax about testing at that point. A test this week put it at ~0.4 PPM, which I found surprising to say the least.
A former tank of mine ran around 0.2 to 0.3 PPM for years so while that may have helped with the dinos I don’t know what’s happening with the coral.

 

[ScottB]

Those are some fairly hardy LPS that you lost. Something is up besides dinos then. I would send out an ICP sample to check for contaminates.

I know there are many huge fans of H2O2 around here. I view it as a powerful and indiscriminate oxidizer. You have any sense that there is some potential correlation/causation between H2O2 and LPS casualties?

 

[jccaclimber]

I've been thinking about that for a while, should probably get to it. I agree, as someone who had a successful acro tank for years, this is downright baffling. It's a duncan that I've grown from a single head to a softball (also been fragging off of it) over the last 7 or 8 years, so I'm not new to this piece. I moved with this tank back in March, and the duncan did quite well for a while after that, even through a lot of the dino bloom.

In the past, even using 3% H2O2 I've found a strong correlation between getting much of it free in the water column and chalices having their tissue start to look thin/skeletons poking out. I later discovered that if I turn off all the pumps and do not turn them back on until the bubbles stop rising from the algae that I do not have that issue.

It's possible there is some sort of contaminant in my H2O2 that has been building up, but that wouldn't be my first guess. Nobody else's hands have been in the tank, my sun screen should be reef safe, I wash after using it, and I think I've only used it once in the past 12 months regardless.

Historically I have not changed water in my larger systems, but I have been this year trying to track this down. My RO reads 0 TDS at the source container, and I'm using the same plastic drums I've been using for years. I bought a large batch of salt several years ago, and am still on the same batch, so no changes there.
My 2 part is BRS, but most of that isn't new either.
I have used a few old containers of Mg. I had laying around.
I messed around with Red Sea AB+ a couple months ago for a few weeks, but stopped after seeing no changes.

I had a ceramic bushing vanish from a WAV pump, but the rest of my pumps looked ok on a recent inspection. I haven't checked for stray current, but I haven't had any shocks, pumps that don't restart, or odd pH/salinity readings and those usually go together.

As a footnote, a portion of the the phosphate rise may be related to a large number of snail deaths. Before they were back in stock at my LFS I ordered a couple dozen snails online, and well less than half ended up surviving.

 

[ScottB]

I've been thinking about that for a while, should probably get to it. I agree, as someone who had a successful acro tank for years, this is downright baffling. It's a duncan that I've grown from a single head to a softball (also been fragging off of it) over the last 7 or 8 years, so I'm not new to this piece. I moved with this tank back in March, and the duncan did quite well for a while after that, even through a lot of the dino bloom.

In the past, even using 3% H2O2 I've found a strong correlation between getting much of it free in the water column and chalices having their tissue start to look thin/skeletons poking out. I later discovered that if I turn off all the pumps and do not turn them back on until the bubbles stop rising from the algae that I do not have that issue.

It's possible there is some sort of contaminant in my H2O2 that has been building up, but that wouldn't be my first guess. Nobody else's hands have been in the tank, my sun screen should be reef safe, I wash after using it, and I think I've only used it once in the past 12 months regardless.

Historically I have not changed water in my larger systems, but I have been this year trying to track this down. My RO reads 0 TDS at the source container, and I'm using the same plastic drums I've been using for years. I bought a large batch of salt several years ago, and am still on the same batch, so no changes there.
My 2 part is BRS, but most of that isn't new either.
I have used a few old containers of Mg. I had laying around.
I messed around with Red Sea AB+ a couple months ago for a few weeks, but stopped after seeing no changes.

I had a ceramic bushing vanish from a WAV pump, but the rest of my pumps looked ok on a recent inspection. I haven't checked for stray current, but I haven't had any shocks, pumps that don't restart, or odd pH/salinity readings and those usually go together.

As a footnote, a portion of the the phosphate rise may be related to a large number of snail deaths. Before they were back in stock at my LFS I ordered a couple dozen snails online, and well less than half ended up surviving.

You've reminded me of something. I have an 8 year old duncan colony that has been through a lot of small, minor mistakes without issue. I noticed that over a few weeks polyp extension just wasn't as much. I sent out my first ICP, and it came back with zero Iodine and very low potassium. I dosed those up and it plumbed up right away. Of course the old adage applies -- don't dose what you don't test.

I do routine WCs with the same IORC salt as always. I blamed the depletion on dinos, but can't really prove that.

 

[jccaclimber]

Minor note to the above, I've been using the strong H2O2 for at least 6 months. Algae will take over, I'll get frustrated, kill it off by spot treating over the course of a week or two, watch it come back. It hasn't been until more recently that I've had the bailout issues.

At first it looked a lot like corals I've seen that are nitrate starved, except most of them are not pale and there's no nitrate shortage.

 

[jccaclimber]

You've reminded me of something. I have an 8 year old duncan colony that has been through a lot of small, minor mistakes without issue. I noticed that over a few weeks polyp extension just wasn't as much. I sent out my first ICP, and it came back with zero Iodine and very low potassium. I dosed those up and it plumbed up right away. Of course the old adage applies -- don't dose what you don't test.

I do routine WCs with the same IORC salt as always. I blamed the depletion on dinos, but can't really prove that.

Now that you mention it, potassium has been reading low, I should push that back up again.
I stopped because I had a friend get an ICP test and my testing of his potassium was ~50 PPM different than the Triton test (don't remember which direction), and I haven't gotten a new test, but it sounds like it's time.
Iodine has always tested ok (both tests Red Sea, but a couple years old at this point), but it's not hard to put in a pinch of KI.

 

[ScottB]

Now that you mention it, potassium has been reading low, I should push that back up again.
I stopped because I had a friend get an ICP test and my testing of his potassium was ~50 PPM different than the Triton test (don't remember which direction), and I haven't gotten a new test, but it sounds like it's time.
Iodine has always tested ok (both tests Red Sea, but a couple years old at this point), but it's not hard to put in a pinch of KI.

I have the Salifert K Test kit. It reads about 20-30 lower than Triton.